If you are Chinese or celebrate Chinese years, 2012 is the year of the Dragon. If you are just a plain old Calhoun County person, well maybe a history buff, this could be classed as the year of the Historical Marker. Either way that’s a pretty impressive year.
I am sure you are aware that there are Historical Markers all over the County. That is one of the ways the Historical Commission helps to preserve the history. Getting a Historical Marker approved is a time consuming job. First you have to know where and what historical event happened at the where you know about. It is only in cartoons that you see a marker that says, “On this spot in 1782 nothing happened that we know of”.
You have to establish the locality and the event and then you have to perform historical research, write up a reason it is historically important and submit it to the Texas Historical Commission. They review and sometimes approve the Marker.
Of course there is money as well as effort along with the review process. Then you have to get the actual marker, and place it. Once that is done you have a little History book on the site where a piece of history happened. Often it is one or has details that aren’t in the regular History books.
The reason this may be the year of the Marker here in Calhoun County is that we just found out that four more of our submissions have been approved. That culminates a lot of work during 2011 and before by the Marker committee.
Some of you know that we already have 45 Markers spread around the County. This would make 49. For a County whose population is 21000 that is a whole lot of History. To have the same percent in Victoria County they would need 200. Harris County would need over 9000. It is doubtful that either has that many. At any rate we have that many and are working on more. We are historically intensive.
The new ones are interesting. One is about what happened in our area with the camps, bombing practice, airfields and enemy U-boats during WWII.. Another is about Ed Bell and his impact. Then we found out that a Civil War Medal of Honor winner actually died in Calhoun County as he continued to serve in the Indianola area. The last one is about the Chihuahua trail. That is that wagon trail from Indianola to Chihuahua Mexico. They carried, among other things, silver from the Mexican mines of Chihuahua to Indianola and then it was shipped to New Orleans and made into Coins.
There is still a lot of research about the actual route of the trail. It is not a well known route through the West Texas area.
The point is the Marker committee did their job well and we soon will have a few more pages in our little “local” history books.
